


seven minutes in heaven.

by outpastthemoat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s09e11 First Born, M/M, Mark of Cain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-11
Updated: 2014-02-11
Packaged: 2018-01-10 06:37:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1156323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outpastthemoat/pseuds/outpastthemoat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You come close, once.</p>
            </blockquote>





	seven minutes in heaven.

1.

You come close, once.  You close your eyes and open them and there you are.  There he is.  He's wearing a coat, a suit, a blue tie.  He's smiling at you, his head nodding close to yours.  You wonder how you must look together, your faces so close,  hands almost touching.  You could kiss him if you wanted to.  You know that you won't.  

He taps the neck of his beer bottle against yours.  Cas, you say.  He doesn't hear you.  He keeps talking.  His knee is pressing against yours, underneath the ledge of the counter, between the barstools. You're thinking, you keep thinking, _Of all the fucking things to make the hit parade. Of all the fucking moments. This one? This one, really_?

"So this is it," you're saying.  There is nothing else you want more than to put your hand out and touch his face.  You know that you won't.  "E.T. goes home."

The funny thing is, you know why you're here.  You remember this moment, you can recall every thought that went through your head, every shameful fucking thought, from  _Now_ _I'll never--_ to  _Now h_ _e'll never--_ to  _Now w_ _e'll never--_ , to the one that brought you here, the thought that keeps bringing you back to this memory:  _He'll be there.  He'll be waiting._

You open your eyes, you gasp for breath.  You bring your hand up to your mouth and it's wet, wet; there is blood dripping from your mouth, from your nose, there is blood trickling down your chin, your chest feels like it has splintered like glass from the inside out.  Your ears are ringing. The Colt is empty.

The skin on your arm is raw, blistered and red, there is poison boiling through your blood.   You stand up, and your boots are crunching down on glass and blood and you are tired and all you can think is _I saw him. I saw him. I was so close. He is there, he must be there._

2.

It becomes a game.  You can never win, but you play it again, the chords of a melody you can never get quite right. 

She's looking at you, not quite frowning, not quite smiling.  You like to think she's grown just a little bit fond of you.  "Dean," she says, "you have to stop."

You shrug your shoulders under your father's worn leather jacket.  You have just seen your brother running ahead of you on a South Dakota road, his backpack swaying on his shoulders, the hem of his jeans dragging on the busted gravel.  

She slips her arm under yours.  You think you might know her better than anyone else.  Certainly no one else has come this close to death and walked away, over and over again.  There was once a time when she might have held you to her chest and lifted you up.  These days you scream her name, chase her down, grasp the folds of her shirt like a desperate man, and all she does is gently push you away.  Please, Tessa, please, you beg her.  You've got to. Help me.  I have to get back there.

He was thirteen, you tell her, and she nods, dark hair slipping down her neck. She looks down, but you think she might be smiling a little.  The skin on your arm is burning.  You rub it absently.  He was thirteen and I was seventeen and it was summer in South Dakota.  Car broke down. 

"What came next?" she asks.  

You're smiling.  You're laughing as you tell her, laughing so hard you think you might be crying.  Bobby, you tell her, he pulled over and picked us up.  We were such fucking idiots.  I miss them so much.

3.

You close your eyes and open them and there you are.  There he is.  He is standing in your kitchen, he is wearing your jeans.  He’s stolen your gray flannel shirt and a pair of faded boxers; he’s lost a sock somewhere.   He is bending over the frying pan on the gas burner.  He is cooking you eggs.  You look at him and you feel what you felt, there in that moment. 

You know what comes next.  You’ll grab Cas around his shoulders and turn him around and hold him tight.  You’ll rest your head on his chest, on that soft flannel shirt that belongs to you but only smells of him and you’ll breathe him in until your chest aches.

“Dean,” he will say.  He might be laughing a little.  “What’s that for?”

"Nothing," you'll say.  "No reason," you'll tell him, and he'll roll his eyes and huff at you and you'll lean on him, letting his hip dig into your side, and he'll lean around you so he can flip your eggs and he'll be saying, "Dean.  _Dean_. They are going to burn."

You will run your fingers through the fine strands of his hair and think about how important touch is, how necessary.  How there have been wild children born from the earth or fallen from the sky, wild creatures who are never tamed.  You will tell yourself that you will not let that happen to him.  You will.  You will say, "Forget the goddamned eggs for a minute."

He will put his hands on your sides and his face in your neck and you will let him because you fucking love him. You want to keep him.  You want him to keep doing these things, keep on cooking your eggs, keep on wearing your shirt.  Keep on stealing your jeans.

You can feel his hair under your fingers, you can feel the warmth of his breath on the side of your face.  It's just like being there.  

I was so fucking sorry, you say.  I never got over past it.  I never stopped being sorry.  I'm so fucking sorry, you say, over and over again, I'm so fucking sorry. 

He doesn't hear.

You close your eyes and breathe him in and your chest aches, it aches, here with him and somewhere far away.  

You open your eyes.  He is gone.

4.

You close your eyes and open them and you see him again.  You remember this night. It has been a long time, you think; all this time you've been thinking of him as dead.  He isn't. Of course he isn't, he's right here.  He's here with you, he's here, he's almost within your reach.  Soon he'll be gone.  He smiles at you and it might be a dream, or it might not.  You say his name, and he doesn't hear you.   _This is it,_  you're thinking,  _I have found him, he was here along along, he must've been here._

"This is nice," he says, like you've taken him to a fucking five-star restaurant instead of the memory of a shitty motel room, plaster raining from the ceiling and falling in your eyes, streetlights lighting up the curve of his cheek, the folds of the sheets at the foot of the bed; a time you can never bring yourself to remember in your waking hours, a place where he is still here with you. 

You're touching his hair, letting your fingers run through the damp dark hairs. He is human.  He is here.  “Cas,” you hear yourself asking. “Where did you go when you died?”

“Nowhere.”

“That’s stupid. You must’ve gone somewhere.”

For a long time you don't hear anything but the sound of Cas’s even, steady breathing. Then Cas finally says, “Heaven. I think.”

“Angel heaven?”

“Human heaven.”

“What did you see?”

“I didn't see anything.”

"Bullshit."

Cas, you say, Cas, please.  I need you to listen, but he's not listening to you.  He can't hear you.  Cas, please.  What did you see when you died?

He's laughing at you, his mouth quirked with that same funny smile he wears when he thinks he's being particularly clever when really he's not.  "Coffee."

This is important, you say.  I need to know, Cas, please tell me.

"Coffee," you're saying, laughing at him.  You can hear his heartbeat under your ear, and you wonder how many more times it will beat before it stops.  How much time he has left.

Tell me where you went, I can't find you anywhere.

"Heaven is Starbucks," he says wisely, like a secret, like he's revealing to you the mysteries of the ages, and he's laughing and you know what comes next.  This is the part where you tell him to get up, let's go: Cas, you know you can't stay.  

You want to tell him,  _This could have been it for me. It might have been enough.  Don't go.  Don't leave me here alone.  Don't leave me here without you._   He won't answer.  You open your eyes.

5.

You open your eyes, and he's there, the way he was in those last moments, and your ears are ringing, your chest is aching, the heat in your arm is burning through your blood, your veins, your heart.

"Will you stop fucking dying on me?" you're asking him, and he can’t shake his head, but the answer is no, no he can’t; he hasn’t got any say in the matter at all.  He's been a dead man for as long as you’ve known him, he’s been destined to die since the moment you slammed a knife in his ribs the first time, when you looked into his eyes with cold triumph; when you left the hilt of your knife in his chest as you stepped away.

He was never meant for peace, for any graceful descent into darkness; he is nothing more than the burning tip of match, quickly snuffed out, left broken in an ashtray.  His story always ends like this, with blood on your fingers and a blade between his ribs, and every time he will tell you that you are worth dying for; he will tell you this, and the conviction in his voice will sound like an eternal truth.  And maybe it is, for him, but you know that eternity is a very long time.  Long enough for stars to burn out of the sky, long enough for thousands of nameless lights to go dark.  He is only one of them, after all, and soon enough no one will remember his name.  His story will end as it begun: a brief flash of light, a crescendo of sparks in a minor key, and he’ll look straight in your eyes as the doors close behind him, as a hurricane in the guise of a dark-haired man winds down and flickers away.

He's got your blade in his chest and he's looking at you and he's smiling. You want to fucking shake him.  You want to seize him by the shoulders and shout in his face, to say You dick, you fucking asshole, please don't fucking leave me.  I'm so fucking sorry.

"What do you see?" you are asking him.  

"You," he says. He's still smiling.  He reaches out to touch you, fingertips against your forehead, and you realize he’s still trying to heal your wounds.  He’s always trying to save you, he stands fast against every impossible odd, and you don’t have time to tell him that he doesn’t need to save you this time, because you’re going wherever he’s headed.  He may go first, but you’ll gladly follow.

You always seem to find words for him, but never the ones that would change things, so your hands tell him all the things you’ll never say: you cradle the back of his head instead of whispering _I’ve got you_ ; you grip him round the waist instead of telling him _I won’t let you go._

You’ll hold him in your arms as the ground turns black, as ash and charred feathers rain down around you, and when he’s gone you’ll lay him down and turn his head to face east.

6.

You see him again.  You look at him; tired, bleak.  You know why you are here.  You know why he is here. 

"You killed me," he is saying.  His voice curls in your ear.  All you could think was  _He came back to me.  Living or dead, he'll always come back to me_ , and you can remember, with a sudden great clarity like light shining bright off the surface of an ocean, the flash of pure fucking joy you were granted with that knowledge.

Now you look at him, you look at the ghost of him and now, as before, you know that he is remembering.  Your arm is aching. You are burning to death. You are being consumed alive.

You close your eyes.  You can still see the blade sticking out of his ribs.  You can still see blood slide down his ribs, over the marked skin.  You have traced the Enochian there with your fingertips.  You have put your mouth to those letters.  You can still see the black leave his eyes, then the light.

 _Gotcha_ , the demon whispers in your ear, and she curls around your shoulders, she settles close against your skin.

"You killed me," he says again.

Yes. I did.

You know what comes after.  You will taste smoke and charred bones in your mouth for days, weeks, months.

You welcome his ghost with your open arms.

7.

You close your eyes and open them and he is there.  There you are.  He's standing on the side of a road, he's going wherever you're headed.  You know it without having to ask.  

"We had an appointment," he's saying, and you're thinking,  _Not here, not this.  Why would he be here?_ but you reach out for him anyway.

He takes your hand, and finally you understand.

"You found me,"  he says, and he's grinning, looking absolutely fucking pleased with himself, smiling with crinkles at the corners of his eyes and your chest aches, your throat aches, you're thinking  _I found him, I found him,_ you're thinking  _Was he here all along?  
_

"Here?" you ask him.

"Yeah," he says.  "With you.  If you don't mind."

You are going to say, I have looked for you for so long.

You feel it the moment the mark takes over. 

You open your eyes.    

 

 

> _if tomorrow wasn't such a long time_
> 
> _then lonesome would mean nothing to you at all_
> 
>  
> 
> _yes, only if my own true love was waiting_


End file.
